She wasn't disappointed. Mr. Morgan leapt to her defense in a series of e-mail exchanges with James Howard, the system's compliance officer. Mr. Morgan said that he concurred with her decision not to turn over materials unless ordered to do so by Superintendent Diane Roussel or a court.

Mr. Howard said that Mrs. Wilty cited Mr. Morgan in saying she didn't have to provide a copy of her school's admissions test to the system's director of innovative programs. She also claimed that Mr. Morgan was "her board member and her legal representative/attorney,'' according to Mr. Howard's e-mail.

In his response, Mr. Morgan did not address whether he was the principal's attorney. Clearly, it would be a conflict of interest for him to provide legal representation to a school system employee. But even if he didn't represent Mrs. Wilty, his interference in her dispute with administrators was inappropriate. Last year, an independent monitor who is overseeing Jefferson's desegregation efforts told U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt that unnamed School Board members were interfering with the district's daily operation, which is prohibited by the district's consent decree.

Mr. Morgan's involvement is even more troubling now that problems with testing and admissions at Gretna No. 2 Academy for Advanced Studies have come to light. Superintendent Roussel suspended Mrs. Wilty with pay following the discovery of 40 irregularities, including test scores that had been scratched out or written over and, in one case, substituted with a higher score.

The findings were significant enough to affect which students were accepted or refused admission to the magnet school, the superintendent said. The probe followed complaints from the district's compliance office and the faith-based Jeremiah Group.

Mr. Morgan, in his e-mail to the compliance officer, said that Mrs. Wilty was "very upset because she felt she was being accused of making racially motivated admission decisions by you or your staff.'' He took Mr. Howard to task for questioning the admissions process, asking whether other magnet schools were being subjected to similar inquiries and asserting that there was no indication of racial bias.

"Obviously then, my concern is as to why your department has injected itself into the admissions process at all,'' he wrote.

Mr. Morgan's attitude is astonishing. Mr. Howard had every reason to raise questions when he noticed test results that seemed "skewed,'' with students receiving high scores on some portions and low scores on others. He says he did not know the race of the students whose scores captured his attention.

"We cannot take the approach that parents do not have the right to question the process for selection,'' Mr. Howard wrote.

He's right, and Mrs. Wilty's intransigence, with Mr. Morgan's backing, did not serve students well.